"Mechanistic science is concerned above all with order. Despite changing conceptions of the domain and scope of scientific investigation, one constant for scientists throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was their common ambition to articulate the laws (preferably expressed in mathematical equations) behind various material phenomena. A corollary assumption — perhaps the most distinctively nineteenth-century contribution to the mechanistic tradition — is the belief that all phenomena possess such regularities. … Mechanistic science's legacy for the late twentieth century consists not only in a handful of methodological practices that have endured with the scientific community, but also in an array of widely disseminated assumptions about knowledge, strategies for organization, and conceptions of an ideal order. … the Canopus novels incorporate a drive for factual plenitude, which may or may not yield an underlying meaning or order, and an assumption of cosmic regularity, which may or may not be empirically accessible … the Canopus novels operate on the principle of defamiliarization. By amalgamating the history of the earth into the fictional cosmos of Canopus, Sirius, and Shammat, the novels critique current modes of thought and ways of doing things while at the same time offering alternatives. Yet the "otherness" of the alternative perspective does not really rest on radical novelty of vision. It derives rather from a thoroughly mechanistic assumption of uniform space-time and an observer independent of the events he/she observes. The defamiliarization is due to the narrator's distance from the events described and from his/her relative freedom from the subjective distortion that plagues Lessing's earthbound characters."